Today's reading from Genesis tells of how God commands Abraham to sacrifice his son, Isaac. They journey to the appointed place. Abraham is on the point of killing Isaac when an angel tells him to stop. Abraham sacrifices a ram instead of his son. Abraham has shown that he fears God; he is ready to obey God even to the point of sacrificing what is most precious to him. God solemnly confirms his promise to bless Abraham, and through Abraham and his descendants to bless the nations of the world.
That is a very basic outline of what happens in this, one of the most famous stories in the Bible. It is told with great restraint. Someone telling such a story today would probably fill it with dialogue and psychologizing commentary, perhaps describing what Abraham was thinking and what he talks about with Isaac on their long walk. But Genesis gives no such detail. The story is stripped bare and yet full of a painful energy that presses questions on us. Why would God tell Abraham to kill Isaac, when Isaac is the fulfilment of God's promise to Abraham and central to God's plan? No comment. Just live with that question. What does Abraham think about God's command? When he tells Isaac that God will provide a lamb, does Abraham believe this? What does Abraham say to his beloved son when finally the time comes to bind him and kill him? And what does Isaac say to his father? It's an unbearable story.
It's also a story with an extraordinary and highly contested afterlife. It is especially important for Jews, touching on themes at the heart of their identity as the children of Abraham through Isaac, the beloved but endangered people of God. The story is also re-told by Muslims, with a distinctively Islamic logic, featuring Abraham's other son, Ishmael, rather than Isaac. The scene of the near-sacrifice of Isaac has been painted by many artists and taken up by many writers. For example, Wilfred Owen turns it to chilling effect in his poem condemning the sacrifice of 'half the seed of Europe, one by one' in the First World War (https://poets.org/poem/parable-old-man-and-young). A former student of mine wrote a challenging song that disturbingly relates this story to abusive relationships between fathers and sons (https://music.youtube.com/watch?v=r5MGWeXmqtM&list=RDAMVMr5MGWeXmqtM).
You can see why this story of an old man hearing a voice telling him to slit his son's throat can be viewed with alarm as a kind of sacred justification for crazed violence or of damaging abuse of all kinds. The Bible can indeed be turned to evil ends: 'the Devil can cite scripture for his purpose'. This passage raises important questions about how we interpret the Bible. We must avoid the dangers of a twofold isolation: the danger of isolating one particular text from the wider context of the whole Bible; and the danger of interpreting the Bible in a personal isolation, with just the echo chamber of my own heart and mind to guide me.
Instead, we read and interpret passages of the Bible in a wide, rich context: the context of the whole Church, across the centuries and across the world, listening together for God's word; and the context of the whole Bible, and the long story it tells of the God who in Jesus shows us that he bears the cost, embraces the sacrifice, of loving us, loving all that he has made.
For Christians, this story of Abraham and Isaac, along with all the Old Testament, is to be read in the light of Jesus. And there are both similarities and differences to explore. Jesus is the beloved son who, like Isaac, shoulders the wood on which he is to be sacrificed: Isaac carries the wood for the fire and Jesus carries the wood of the cross. And the stories of Isaac and Jesus both come out of the shadow of death into the light of life, ending in hope; in each case, the beloved son lives on as the focus of God's continuing promise to bless the world. But the key difference is that with Jesus the sacrifice of the son cannot be bypassed; on Golgotha there was no convenient animal to be sacrificed instead of the beloved Son. As St Paul says, God the Father 'did not withhold his beloved Son, but gave him up for all of us' (Romans 8:32). Jesus himself is the lamb provided by God to be the sacrifice that must be made if the story of salvation is to go on, the story of God and his people and the blessing of the world.
But because Jesus is God-with-us, because God was in Christ, the sacrifice of Jesus is not about God pouring out his wrath on an innocent third party. The cross is not something external to God. It is the taking up of sacrifice into the heart of God. But then it's not something external to Abraham when he is commanded to sacrifice Isaac. Abraham's life is present in Isaac, his hope is bound up with his beloved son, so the sacrifice required of Abraham is nothing less than a falling into dark nothingness. So also with God the Father and Jesus. When Jesus cries from the cross, 'My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?' the Father does not calmly smile down upon this scene any more than Abraham relishes preparing Isaac for sacrifice. In the light of Jesus, the story of Abraham and Isaac becomes a preliminary sketch, incomplete but very powerful, of the cost to God of loving the world. God so loved the world that he gave his only Son. God so loved the world that he gave himself in his only Son.
So in this story the figure of Abraham speaks to us of God and of God's willingness to embrace the unbearable cost, the total sacrifice, of loving what he has made.
However, Abraham speaks to us not just about God but also about human response to God. In this stripped down narrative, Abraham says very little. At the two points when God's call comes to him, he simply replies: 'Here I am' (22:1; 22:11). At one level, there's nothing at all remarkable about this common Hebrew expression. But in this densely packed story, in which not a word is wasted, there is surely more to it than just a business-like 'hello' or 'yes?' at the start of a phone call. The Jewish Study Bible comments that there is 'no good English equivalent' to the Hebrew hinneni, which 'indicates readiness, alertness, attentiveness, receptivity, and responsiveness to instructions'. Abraham's 'Here I am' suggests total availability and responsiveness to God. He is the man who says 'Here I am' and really means it. It's also the response we hear again at other key moments of calling in the Bible: notably on the lips of Moses at the burning bush (Exodus 3:4); of Samuel, when he is called by God in the night (1 Samuel 3:4); and of Isaiah, who, when God asks 'Whom shall I send?' responds: 'Here I am. Send me.' (Isaiah 6:8)
It's interesting that in another story (Genesis 18: 22-33), a younger Abraham says a lot to God, negotiating at great length, pleading, even feistily telling God how he should behave as judge of all the earth. In this other story and elsewhere the Bible suggests the life of faith can and maybe should include arguing with God, questioning God, complaining to God. But today's story strikes a different note. Abraham here symbolizes total availability and obedient attentiveness to God. He says 'Here I am', and he means it.
We are much influenced in the West today by ideals of autonomy and the kind of personal authenticity that's about deciding for ourselves who we are and the meaning of our lives, living our own dream. As a result, we tend to be less comfortable than Christians used to be in talking of submissive obedience to God. But there is no avoiding this story's challenging call to precisely that: submissive obedience to God, the attitude that seeks, like Abraham, like Jesus, to say to God 'Not my will, but yours, be done'. Here I am, ready to do your will.
Of course, there's much we could say to push back at such ideas. How can we really know what is God's will? Talk of submissive obedience sounds old-fashioned, oppressive, open to abuse. Again, it's important to remember context. This is one of the last of several Abraham stories in Genesis. By now, he's an old man. He has been through so much since God first called him. There have been good days but also very difficult days, times of frustration and doubt, failures, family division. The Abraham stories are not about a robot programmed to do what God instructs, but about Abraham learning through a long and painful pilgrimage to trust and give himself to the God who has given himself to Abraham, the God who has pledged himself, made covenant (Genesis 15). Gradually, Abraham has learnt that when he entrusts himself to the God who has called him, God provides, and Abraham is able to play his part in God's plan.
This unbearable story of the call to sacrifice his beloved son suggests the full flowering of Abraham's trust in God. Abraham's 'Here I am' (with who knows how much agony behind it) expresses that trust and the obedience that flows from it. And we are called to grow into that 'Here I am' spirit of availability and obedience. Just in case anyone is wondering, we can say, definitively, in the light of Christ, that God will not impose on us the kind of test described in this story, but we may indeed be called to painful sacrifices in the way of obedience to God. Like Abraham, though more fully in the light of Christ, we know the costly covenant love of the God who gives himself to us. We can trust this God and give ourselves to him. Like Abraham, we can stand before God and say 'Here I am' (especially when we don't know what else to pray).
Here I am, God, held in your sacrificial love. You give yourself to me; I give myself to you. I am ready to offer my life in your service, ready to make the sacrifices you might ask of me, ready to let go of things that stand between you and me, ready to let go of my life as I plan it, ready to embrace the life into which you lead me.
Well, maybe not quite ready to say all that, not all the time anyway, but wanting to be ready, wanting to be.
Here I am.
David Marshall